Death Sentence

Death Sentence

, When lawyers sought to find out why more blacks and Hispanics weren't serving on grand juries in Hartford, Connecticut, they made a surprising discovery. Citizens of Hartford haven't been doing their fair share of grand jury duty for the past three years. Not that they were shirking their civic responsibilities. A computer glitch forced the d at the end of Hartford into the column used for information about prospective federal jurors. The result: 5,500 healthy Hartford citizens were listed as dead. "It's caused us a lot of grief," concedes Kevin Rowe, the clerk of the federal court.